Day Two Questions

Top 20 Engineering Accomplishments of the 20th Century

• "How many of the 20th century's greatest engineering achievements will you use today? Explore our list of the top 20 achievements and learn how engineering shaped a century and changed the world.
• "The Greatest Engineering Achievements website celebrates a remarkable century of technological achievement. The website contains detailed historical information, timelines, and personal essays by key innovators for each of 20 major engineering accomplishments of the 20th century.
• "The content for the site is adapted from the 2003 book, A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements That Transformed Our Lives. The book was developed through a project initiated by the National Academy of Engineering."

Let's look at three...

#20: High Performance Materials: "All hail, King Steel," wrote Andrew Carnegie in a 1901 paean to the monarch of metals, praising it for working "wonders upon the earth." A few decades earlier a British inventor named Henry Bessemer had figured out how to make steel in large quantities, and Carnegie and other industry titans were now producing millions of tons of it each year, to be used for the structural framing of bridges and skyscrapers, the tracks of sprawling railway networks, the ribs and plates of steamship hulls, and a multitude of other applications extending from food cans to road signs.


#17: Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies: If coal was king in the 19th century, oil was the undisputed emperor of the 20th. Refined forms of petroleum, or "rock oil," became—in quite literal terms—the fuel on which the 20th century ran, the lifeblood of its automobiles, aircraft, farm equipment, and industrial machines.


#15: As a frequent purveyor of domestic dreams, Good Housekeeping magazine was on familiar ground in 1930 when it rhetorically asked its readers: "How many times have you wished you could push a button and find your meals deliciously prepared and served, and then as easily cleared away by the snap of a switch?" No such miraculous button or switch was in prospect, of course—not for cooking meals, cleaning the house, washing clothes, or any of the other homemaking chores that, by enduring custom, mainly fell to women.

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